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Ad Quality and Quality Index

Ad Quality
Your ad’s rank in sponsored search results is determined by its bid and ad quality. Ad quality is a measure of how relevant an ad is and it is determined in comparison to other ads displayed at the same time. Factors that influence ad quality are:

• The ad's historical performance – the ad’s click-through rate relative to competitors and the ad’s position on the results page.
• The ad's expected performance - determined by various relevance factors considered by Yahoo!'s ranking algorithms. 

Quality Index
You can gain an understanding of your ad quality by looking at your quality index. Quality index is a relative measure of your ads’ performance. Each ad has a Quality Index displayed as one to five bars (1 = poor and 5 = good). The quality index:

• tells you how well your ad is performing, on average, for all keywords in an ad group for which it is displayed relative to other ads
• is an aggregate of all your keywords in a particular ad group at the time the ad is displayed. Your ad’s quality impacts how much you need to bid and the position in which your ad is displayed for a given position – ads with higher quality may require a lower bid and receive a better rank.

You should strive to improve the quality of your ads because:

•  they may achieve more clicks at a potentially lower cost per click; and therefore increase ROI
• higher quality ads are ranked higher and given more prominent positioning
• high ranking ads are usually more relevant which results in a better user (searcher) experience.

The metrics related to your most displayed ad for Sponsored Search and Content Match are available in the Ad Group Performance panel on the Ad Group Details page and for all of your ads from the Ads tab on the Ad Group Details page. This data can assist you as you monitor your ad’s performance and understand your quality index:

Display Rate (%): The percentage that your ad was displayed relative to the other ads in the ad group.

CTR (%): The ratio of clicks received divided by the number of impressions generated.

Clicks: The ratio of clicks received divided by the number of impressions generated.

Quality Index: Informs you how well your ad is performing, on average, for all keywords in an ad group for which it is displayed relative to other ads. The bars reflect your ad's ability to meet the needs of users by looking at your click-through rate, as well as other relevance factors. You can view your quality index from the Ads tab on the Ad Group Details page and in the Ad Performance Report.

Low Quality Index Ads Alert
Low Quality Index Ads Alerts provide you an additional layer of feedback to notify you of opportunities to increase ad quality. You will receive a Low Quality Index Ads Alerts if an ad’s Quality index score is one (1) bar.

A count of Low Quality Index ads will be provided in the “Account Summary” tab of the dashboard. If you have no low Quality Index ads, the count will not appear. You can click on the count and will be taken to a page with the ads with low Quality Index. A high priority alert notification can also be sent to you via email. The option will be added to the Alert Notification options in the Notification Settings page. If no master account user has subscribed to this alert, the email notification will be sent to the account primary contact.

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